


Eleven Up, Three Down

by goldfinch



Category: Flesh and Bone (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-25
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2018-05-02 15:03:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5252651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The room is dark, and no one can tell he isn't wearing a fancy suit, just the clothes he drove from Pittsburgh in. He listens to the hushed whispers around him and then the silence before the music, and then there is the music, and the dancers, and his sister, his sister, his—</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eleven Up, Three Down

He barely makes curtain. Halfway across the bridge, he stopped and sat on a block of concrete and looked out at the river, and the lights, and Claire's face in the photograph in his hand. The knowledge hit him like a bomb blast underfoot, silent and disorienting but powerful, and suddenly he knew: he couldn't leave like this. He couldn't leave at all.

He sprinted to catch a taxi at the end of the bridge, gave the name of the theater, and was there in twenty minutes. He'd already missed the first performance of the night, something with a lot of red and a girl starring whose name he didn't know, whose face he didn't recognize on the posters. He fumbled in his jacket for the ticket, fingers grazing the knit cap beside it.

"Here," he said, pulling the ticket out. The man at the door took it, raising an eyebrow and looking Bryan up and down. Bryan got enough of those looks from superior officers to know when he was being judged, but the man didn't say anything, just took the ticket and tore it and stepped aside.

Inside, the theater is still lit up. The curtain hangs red and heavy across the stage, and classical music floats from speakers secreted around the room. Like magic, like it's a sign, the lights dim as soon as he steps through the doors. They come up again, but the quality of the voices around him changes. The lights dim again. When he finds his seat—surprisingly close to the stage, on the ground floor—people have to stand up to let him pass, and he has a moment of relieved pride. These people don't know who he is, who Claire is to him, but they still have to stand up to let him pass. It's so different from what his father's house was like.

But now the room is dark, and no one can tell he isn't wearing a fancy suit, just the clothes he drove from Pittsburgh in. He listens to the hushed whispers around him and then the silence before the music, and then there is the music, and the dancers, and his sister, his sister, his—

The leotard she’s in makes her look almost naked, which seems to be the point, and though he doesn’t like knowing everyone else is looking at her it still turns him on. He’s never seen her dance like this before. Not with the stage and the costumes, and the other dancers flowing around her like water, like she’s the stone they have to part around. He’s not used to seeing her like that. When he was gone, in his mind, she’d been the same broken thing their father had made him, a person only whole when the other was around. Them against the world, that was what he used to say to her, the only thing that seemed to help aside from You’re real, you’re real; I love you. Now, coming back, he’s seen that he was wrong all that time. When he was gone, she was working to build something new. And this is the thing she was building.

At the end of it, he claps until his hands hurt, until his palms are numb. Then he fights his way through the crowd backstage. It’s a different world back there, unlike the dark-suited ballet-goers in their ties and fancy shoes; everyone is in makeup; everyone is wearing something colorful. The sound of laughter echoes down the hard-paneled hallways, and it strikes him how cheerful this place is, how unlike his and Claire’s house, growing up. Of course Claire would want to escape to a place like this. He’d suggested, more than once, that they run away—had even once suggested New York, a city big enough to lose themselves in—he only wishes she’d waited for him to do it. But maybe that was the point. Maybe that’s what he’s been missing all along.

The corridors are long, with too many doors, and eventually he has to stop one of the chorus ballerinas and ask for directions. After that Claire’s dressing room isn’t hard to find, but he still stops when he gets to it. It’s just a door, but he still hesitates; he lays his hand on the knob and then can’t turn it. He’s terrified he’ll find it locked.

It hasn't always been like—like that. Like this. Before he left for Afghanistan, before Claire got pregnant, before she put a lock on her room and stopped listening to him when he begged her to let him in, tell him what was wrong—before all that, things were good. Or, as good as things ever were, in their father's house.

He turns the knob. The door opens.

The room is bright, a row of lights over the vanity casting Claire’s face in sharp porcelain relief. She’s removed most of the makeup, which he can tell because her face doesn’t look caked on, the way so many had in the hallways. There’s still a certain shine at her eyelids, but her skin is clean and bright. She turns toward him so slowly it looks like she’s moving underwater, or in a dream.

"Bryan," she says—breathes, really.

His hands open and close. He can’t make his feet carry him forward. ”I made curtain," he says, because he doesn't know what else to tell her. "I saw you."

Her face doesn’t change, at first, and for a long moment Bryan wonders if she’s really seeing him at all. Her body is stiff and remote, her eyes distant, like she’s still looking at herself in the mirror, or maybe just remembering the show, when she’d danced better than an angel ever could. When the entire audience had surged to their feet as she finished.

"I didn't mean what I said back at the apartment," she says. "I didn't. I'm sorry."

 And just like that, all the breath goes out of his body. He hadn’t been sure what he would be coming back to when he turned around on that bridge; even watching her dance, he hadn’t been sure. She’d called him back, and he’d come, but the fight they’d had at her apartment…. She stands, and comes toward him, arms folding up against her chest and then against his, fingers hooked over his collarbones. Her body feels so fragile in his arms. Her wrists, her ribs, the knots of her spine when he reaches up to twine his fingers in her hair. The wig comes off in his hands.

"Shit," he says, holding it like a dead animal. It looks strange. Of course it was never a part of Claire, of course it was only something they stuck on to make her look the way they wanted her to. But still. "I forgot."

Claire pulls it from his hands and drops it unceremoniously onto the floor. "That was the point," she says, and when she looks up at him her eyes are harder and stranger than he's ever seen them. This is not the same girl he found at a strip club in the middle of the city, in some stupid babydoll lingerie but in a wig then, too, not unlike the one she was just wearing.

She lays her hands on his chest, so lightly he almost doesn't feel it.

Then the door swings open behind them, and Bryan turns in time to see the man's expression shift from smug pleasure to confusion and irritation. "Who the fuck are you?" the man asks. He's the same height as Bryan, more or less, but he's thin, with narrow shoulders and a face unused to physical violence. Bryan lifts his chin.

"I'm her brother."

The man's face changes, realization flickering over it, and then the pleasure that had been on his face when he first walked in returns, twice as smug. "Ah. The Pittsburgh gossips had a lot to say about _you_.”

Bryan _feels_ Claire flinch away in his arms, and he grips her tighter. When she came to him in his room over Thanksgiving, he felt her weight bend the mattress under him. She didn't weigh much—she still doesn't weigh much. His little bird. His little rabbit, made real. "Fuck off," Bryan says. He's met worse people in his life than this man.

Claire lays a hand on his arm, tender and light, but when she speaks her voice is firm, just as it was when she spoke to him. "Leave, Paul.” She does not say please, and after a moment Paul bares his neck.

"Stop by my office before you leave, dear," he says as he turns, like he has any right to talk to Claire like that, like he has any right to even look at her.

Claire doesn't say anything, but she doesn't look away from the door until it closes. Then she lets out a huff of breath, and Bryan sees her nostrils flare a little. He can't help smiling, though he folds it between his teeth so she doesn't see. He wants to kiss her. He wants to lay her down on the broad makeup table and peel her leotard from her body, the fabric the same color as her skin, nakedness revealing nakedness. I don’t think it will feel real unless you see it, she said, in her cold apartment living room, before she called him a monster and slammed the door shut behind him. Can both things be true? But then, she said she hadn’t meant it, that second thing.

He reaches for her hand, but doesn’t touch her. “Can I—?”

Her mouth opens a little, a word hovering there that he can’t make out. It could be anything. Then she closes her eyes and just leans into him, like someone’s cut her strings—only she doesn’t have strings anymore. There’s no one up there in the shadows making her move; not their father, not the ghost of their child, not the gossips back home or that arrogant fuck that came to see her just now. Not even Bryan himself. Her arms tighten around his shoulders, and he’s reminded, not for the first time, how strong she really is. Stronger than him, anyway, to carry on alone the way she had.

“I love you,” he says into her hair.

He can feel her breathing, warm and soft against the skin just above his shirt collar. 

“I know,” she says.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://furs-and-gold.tumblr.com/)!


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